Mick Jagger biography looks beyond the Rolling Stone’s bad boy image

“Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste.”

So sings Mick Jagger at the beginning of Sympathy for the Devil, the song that, when released on the Rolling Stones’ 1968 album Beggars Banquet, sparked controversy as it supposedly confirmed what many critics of the band already suspected: Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts were bona fide agents of the devil.

But the song also makes an apt metaphor for the carefully curated persona of Mick Jagger: That of the rebellious outlaw and villainous rock ’n’ roll frontman created by Stones’ manager Andrew Oldham, who wanted to sell an anti-Christ alternative to the angelic Beatles.

For biographer Philip Norman, the challenge of his new book, Mick Jagger, was to look past that front and uncover the real musician, the London School of Economics grad of middle-class upbringing who simply loved the blues and was willing to ride Oldham’s vision to the top.

“The real Jagger was nothing like the public-made image,” says Norman, sitting at his publisher’s Toronto offices. “Oldham said to him, ‘If you pretend to be wicked, you’ll get rich.’ And that was it.”

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Norman, an English journalist who first interviewed Jagger in 1965, has since written three biographies on the Stones, as well as tackling The Beatles, John Lennon, Elton John and Buddy Holly. He says he approached writing his Jagger bio the same as if he was writing an “epic novel.”

“Much like a David Copperfield or a Nicholas Nickleby, just going through an amazing myriad world of events and adventures, but on the side of the hero, even if it’s an anti-hero,” he says.

Fortunately, Jagger’s life reads better than some fiction, and Norman covers all facets of his main character, from the mundane to the mythological, in a 600-page tome that is part bildungsroman, part Peter Pan.

“Mick, who’s really been doing the same thing since he was 19, suffers this eternal teenager syndrome, in that he never has to grow up and face uncomfortable realties,” Norman says, adding that it’s on the business side where Jagger eventually came into his own.

That side of Jagger is a numbers-driven businessman who would rest control of the Stones from unscrupulous managers and become CEO of a brand that celebrates its 50th anniversary this year as the longest performing band in history.

But of course, it wouldn’t be a Jagger bio without also covering the parts of his life that add to the myth, including his very brief stints with drugs and his countless relationships with women. Although Norman, not interested in tabloid gossip, says many stories have been greatly exaggerated or completely made up, and he spends much time setting the record straight. For instance, there’s the rumoured sexual relationship between Jagger and Bowie, a big part of Christopher Andersen’s Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger, released in July.

“That story has been around for so long and it’s entirely not true,” Norman says. “He never really had time to mess around with other men because he was messing around with so many women. This is the most heterosexual man in the cosmos. Why don’t people want to accept that?”

There’s also the tale surrounding the ill-fated Altamont festival, in which Hells Angels members, commissioned to work security, killed an audience member while the Stones’ played Sympathy for the Devil.

“The mythology was that Mick’s arrogance and vanity unleashed these dark forces, but in reality he even tried to calm things down by doing a Muzak version of Under My Thumb,” Norman says. “If anything, his own life was in danger that day by those thuggish Hells Angels, but he finished the show.”

In the book, Norman interviews Sam Cutler, the emcee at Altamont with a front row seat to the bloody spectacle, who said Jagger “showed massive, massive courage that terrible moment.”

The fact that Jagger, who didn’t reply to Norman’s requests to participate in the book, never bothers to correct the record no matter how nasty the rumour is just another way he contributes to his own myth-making.

“He’s told me himself that he doesn’t remember anything in his career, which is quite an interesting way to fend off awkward questions,” Norman says, adding that it also has the adverse effect of cancelling out a lot of career highs, “such as reading poetry in London’s Hyde Park to a quarter million people after Jones died, or being a loving father to seven children by four different women.”

Although even Norman finds it hard to argue with the approach of a man who set the template for practically every rock ’n’ roll frontman to follow.

“At nearly 70, he’s still thought to be cool and is associated with danger, drugs and sex,” he says. “He is the patent, even if in real life, Mick didn’t have a dark side.”